[OGo-Evolution] working mangling daemon allowing basic OGo-Evolution

[Erik Romijn]

Hello,

the last month I have been working for my company on the perl daemon I
proposed earlier on this list. We now have basic read only calendar and
contact support for Evolution<->OGo.

As proposed earlier, the daemon is located between the Ximian Connector
for Exchange (2.0) and ZideStore. It mangles data when needed.
Some comments on the list suggested that this was a bad idea and that
any such attempts would better be aimed at modifying either the
connector or zidestore. However, as my company needs this connection and
we our programmers are not skilled enough in either C or Objective C, we
started this way.

Helge Hess said earlier on this list that although ZideStore developpers
plan to work on connector 2.0 support, it will take a while before they
start on that. Therefore we started our own attempt.

We see this daemon as something temporarily. At this moment it will
provide users with the possibility to connect Evolution to an
OpenGroupware.org server. We hope that later on this daemon will help
ZideStore or other developpers to find out what exactly needs to be
adjusted in order to make ZideStore compatible with the 2.0 connector.
Another possibility is that other people can use this information to
make a modified version of the Exchange connector.

The daemon currently makes it possible to view your Calendar items and
Contacts stored in OpenGroupware. Some very simple and quite unfinished
task support is also implemented. By default this is disabled because it
can cause long delays in the Calendar display.
Calendar items seem quite OK, although it can be a bit slow if you store
lots of items (>300). Contacts also seem to work fine.

There is still lots of work here, but at least we finished some of the
most important parts. We could use more developpers.

Using the daemon is quite simple.
Download the perl script from
http://oracle.toltech.nl/~erik/ex2ogo-0.1.pl
Edit the config section at the beginning of the file.
Start the script and set your evolution exchange to connect to the
daemon on it's listening port. Disable SSL and use plaintext passwords.
Fill in the host and the port that ex2ogo is running on. In all cases I
have seen the OWA path should be /zidestore.
Press the arrow next to your exchange account in the Mail display of
Evolution. It should now ask for your password and after that you should
be able to turn on (mark the checkbox) the calendar. It seems that you
don't need to go to Mail if you set evolution to remember your password.
You can also view your contacts.

What doesn't work yet; i.e.: what needs to be done in the short future:
- Support for SUBSCRIBE; to make evolution update it's contact view
(restart required now)
- Finish support for tasks
- Implement write support
- Fix any bugs you people encounter :)

If you'd like to help out: send a mail to me so that we can coordinate
the work a bit. Feel free to take a look in the code, it is quite well
commented.

greetings,
Erik Romijn